“A Matter of Statistics” or “0.13% L33t!”

Gear acquisition in contemporary WoW is considerably more complex than it was in vanilla WoW. Originally, you could get epic gear that was well crafted to suit your class only from 40-man instances. Since then, 5-mans, 10-mans, arenas, battlegrounds, quests, vendors, reputation rewards all give epic loot.

A question arises:

Is the ability to acquire epic loot from a plethora of different sources responsible for a decline in the pursuit of endgame content?